by Craig Nelson
Radon is a naturally occurring gas rising from the decay of uranium and thorium beneath your feet. In a horrible irony, it would turn out that the area surrounding Three Mile Island was four times as tainted with radon as the US average. Though many residents are convinced to this day that the disaster contaminated their lands, workers were in fact never irradiated by TMI; instead, they were contaminating Three Mile Island from their radon-tainted basements.
In 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a license extension for Three Mile Island’s other reactor, which has never caused any trouble, and TMI-1 will continue providing electricity to Dauphin County until April 19, 2034.
14
There Fell a Great Star from Heaven, Burning as It Were a Lamp
ON April 28, 1986, as workers checked in for their morning shift, warning alarms clanged and brayed across Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear power plant. The employees’ clothes were saturated in radioactive particles, which meant a Forsmark reactor had to be severely damaged. After a morning spent investigating their equipment, however, the Swedes realized their plant couldn’t be the reason for the contamination, that this must be a story like Stanley Watras’s in Pennsylvania—the workers were getting irradiated from somewhere else. Checking the patterns of the wind for the previous few days revealed only one possible origin—nearly seven hundred miles away.
On April 27, the same alarms had screamed across the Institute for Nuclear Power Engineering, just outside Minsk, Belarus. Institute physicists tramped across their grounds, doing exactly what the Swedes would do, searching for what was wrong with their piles or their plumbing or their contamination shields. And just as in Forsmark, the radiation was everywhere, a stunning amount of contamination—soaking the employees’ uniforms and civilian clothes, in their hair and in their shoes, absorbed by air filters tested at one hundred times normal, and even found in the soil and leaves of the trees outside the institute’s walls. Lab chief Valentin Borisevich:
The weather was so wonderful! Spring. I opened the window. The air was fresh and clean, and I was surprised to see that for some reason the bluejays I’d been feeding all winter, hanging pieces of salami out the window for them, weren’t around.
By lunchtime we find out there’s a radioactive cloud over all of Minsk. We determined that the activity was iodide in nature. That means the accident was at a reactor. My first reaction was to call my wife, to warn her. But all our telephones at the institute were bugged.
I pick up the phone. “Listen to me carefully.”
“What are you talking about?” my wife asked loudly.
“Not so loud. Close the windows, put all the food in plastic. Put on rubber gloves and wipe everything down with a wet cloth. Put the rag in a bag and throw it out. If there’s laundry drying on the balcony, put it back in the wash.”
“What’s going on?”
“Not so loud. Dissolve two drops of iodide in a glass of water. Wash your hair with it.”
As the Belarusians immediately knew, iodide could only mean one thing. A reactor, somewhere, had exploded, and a cloud of radioactive fallout was floating across Europe, a toxic brume that would eventually cover the whole of the Continent from Russia to the Pyrenees. Experts would differ in their calculations as to the cloud’s radioactive breath, which they described in layman’s terms as “Hiroshimas.” At first, they said it was ten times the radioactive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Then they said more like dozens of Hiroshimas. Then, it was two hundred Hiroshimas. And then, four hundred Hiroshimas.
The worried Belarusians called their nearest neighboring power plant, in Lithuania, only to be told that the same mystery was frightening the scientists there. Then, they called the other neighboring plant, in Ukraine. They called again and again, but no one answered the phone.
Eisenhower’s Colorado neutron wand did not create the world’s first civilian atomic power station. The Soviets did, on June 1, 1954, with the Atom Mirny-1 (“peaceful atom”) reactor, 110 kilometers southwest of Moscow, using graphite as a moderator (like Fermi’s squash court) but with water for coolant. This combination, Hans Bethe explained, was “fundamentally faulty, having a built-in instability. . . . [A] reactor that loses its coolant can under certain circumstances increase in reactivity and run progressively faster and hotter rather than shut itself down.” Additionally, nuclear burners using only water had a moderator and coolant that couldn’t burn; those using only graphite had a moderator and coolant that couldn’t explode. The Soviet pile design, used in twelve plants across the USSR including the Ukrainian pile where the phone went unanswered that April 27, had a coolant that could boil into steam and explode, and a moderator that could erupt into nearly unquenchable atomic flames.
Due south of Finland, nestled between Russia to the east and Poland and Romania to the west, the Eurasian Great Plains of Belarus and Ukraine became, under Soviet domination, both a buffer zone against another invasion by Europeans (as an army would have to kill many Ukrainians and Belarusians before reaching Russian souls) and a breadbasket for the empire. Like the topographically similar American Midwest of Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, this territory was once a great sea, and dog-day temperatures can reach 113 degrees.
In 1970, on the banks of the Pripyat River sixty miles north of Kiev, the Soviets began what was planned as Europe’s greatest nuclear energy generator—the V. I. Lenin Atomic Power Station. By 1986, they had four thousand-megawatt reactors burning day and night, with two more under construction and two more being planned. At the same time, Moscow built a new concrete metropolis, Pripyat, home to fifty thousand. The town and its energy complex were all that communism was supposed to achieve: grand, spacious, powerful, yet at the same time gemütlich. Pripyat was notable for having no shortages: plenty of roses, shoes from Czechoslovakia, and enough energy from its plant to provide for itself as well as 2 million residents of Kiev. Surrounded by cherry orchards, the Lenin’s nuclear smokestacks were painted in red and white stripes, like peppermint candy canes from Santa. It was all so unlike the little farming town of twelve thousand next door, Chernobyl—Ukrainian for “mugwort” or “wormwood,” the leafy source of vermouth and absinthe—which had been a predominantly Jewish enclave for three hundred years, with a dynasty of illustrious wise men and two Hasidic zaddik shrines still in use. Perhaps this history is why many locals insist that the Wormwood mentioned in the Bible’s book of Revelation was a Chernobyl prophecy from the hand of God:
And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp,
and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;
And the name of the star is called Wormwood:
and the third part of the waters became wormwood;
and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
In case of a power failure, the Lenin Atomic Station had emergency diesel engines to power its coolant pumps, but it would take forty seconds to bring those engines up to speed—time enough for the reactor to overheat. On April 25, 1986, plant electrical engineers, naive to the ways of physics, decided to conduct a safety experiment. They wanted to see if, after powering down Reactor #4 to 2.5 percent, sufficient inertial spin was left in its turbines to generate enough electricity to power the coolant pumps for those forty seconds.
The test was supposed to take place during the day, but given the unusually high electrical demand that afternoon, it was postponed to 11:00 p.m. that night. The engineers decided to drop the power precipitously to make up for lost time, but did not follow the correct procedure, and the reactor’s fission stopped entirely. To fix that, they withdrew most of the 211 control rods to restart the chain reaction, but this only brought #4 back to thirty megawatts . . . a level at which the pile was at its most unstable. The correct thing to do was to wait twenty-four hours for the neutron balance to right itself, but the deputy chief working that shift wanted this experiment over and done with and demanded the reactor
be powered up. By 1:00 a.m. on the twenty-sixth, they had withdrawn all but six rods—though knowing full well the minimum reserve in place for such a reactor was thirty rods—raising it to 200 megawatts. Additionally, for this “safety” experiment, they had disabled Reactor 4’s emergency electrical backup systems and the emergency core-cooling system. One operator was confused by the instructions and called over another employee. “In the program there are instructions of what to do, and then a lot of things crossed out,” he pointed out. The other operator insisted they should “follow the crossed-out instructions.”
At 1:23 a.m., the turbine was shut down for the experiment, halting power to the coolant pumps. The coolant started to boil. As the 205 control rods were then reinserted, they drove out water, increasing both heat and fission, as Bethe had noted. As alarms began to ring, the engineer in charge of operations, Leonid Toptunov, pushed the emergency SCRAM button. But it was already too late—now the control rods refused to fully enter their slots, perhaps due to heat warping the rods’ channels. Instead of shutting down, Reactor 4’s temperature rose to a hundred times normal. The core began to melt.
A foreman looked down to see the reactor’s shield, made of 770-pound cubes, shaking and rattling “as if seventeen hundred people were tossing their hats into the air.” Turbine operator Yuri Korneev: “At the moment when the turbine stopped working, there was a sudden explosion in the area of the tubing corridor. I saw it with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears. I saw pieces of the reinforced-concrete wall begin to crumble, and the reinforced-concrete roof of our Turbine 7 began to fall. In a few seconds the diesel apparatus kicked in, and emergency lights went on. I immediately looked at the roof of the engine room. It was crumbling in layers. Falling pieces of concrete were slowly coming closer to my turbine. . . . It was all so unexpected. It was difficult to figure out what was happening.”
Two explosions then struck back-to-back, blowing a hole in the thousand-ton concrete shield, revealing a reactor engulfed in nuclear fire, spewing radioactive gas, graphite, and uranium debris into the sky. The pile continued to explode “like a volcanic eruption,” Toptunov said, raining down lead cubes and flaming graphite, which in turn set the asphalt roofs of the complex’s other buildings aflame. The explosions also broke the reactor’s fuel packs, which fell into the paths of the control rods, keeping them from being inserted beyond a third of the way in, followed by a massive burst of steam rupturing the two-thousand-ton reactor case.
Besides the worrisome combination of graphite and water, the Soviets used concrete covers for their reactors, but not the fortified containment domes that keep other nations’ atomic accidents from contaminating their neighbors, “since all Soviet nuclear facilities were designed so they could also produce weapons-grade plutonium,” as Richard Rhodes explained. “This was in fact the reason why the facilities did not have the traditional containment shells protecting the public from just this sort of accident; it had a removable lid for ease of fuel change and the production of nuclear weapons. Once the lid blew off, that was the end of containment. So the history of thinking of this as a civilian nuclear disaster is quaint; it was a Cold War–era military nuclear disaster.”
The core exploded all over again, either from steam, hydrogen, or out-of-control fission. “Flames, sparks, and chunks of burning material went flying into the air above the #4 unit . . . red-hot pieces of nuclear fuel and graphite,” physicist Grigori Medvedev remembered. “About fifty tons of nuclear fuel evaporated and were released by the explosion into the atmosphere . . . about seventy tons were ejected sideways from the periphery of the core, mingling with a pile of structural debris, onto the roof. . . . Some fifty tons of nuclear fuel and eight hundred tons of reactor graphite remained in the reactor vault, where it formed a pit reminiscent of a volcanic crater.”
The air, ionized, glowed in a purple haze, radiance visible, evolving to a neon pink so vibrant and so vast that everyone in Chernobyl and Pripyat came out of their homes to watch. “I can still see the bright crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn’t any ordinary fire, it was some kind of emanation,” Nadezhda Vygovskaya said. “It was pretty. I’ve never seen anything like it in the movies. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful. Though I wouldn’t say that it had no smell—it wasn’t the spring or autumn smell, but something else, and it wasn’t the smell of earth.” Andrei Sakharov: “Do you know how pleasantly the air smells of ozone after a nuclear explosion?” It smells fresh and clean and electric, like the air of great natural hydrodynamics, of Angel, of Niagara, of Victoria.
“In the darkness we made our way through piles of rubble and went up to the landing. Everything was in shambles, steam was coming out in bursts, and we were up to our ankles in water,” radiation monitor Nikolai Gorbachenko said. “Suddenly we saw [a man] lying unconscious on his side, with bloody foam coming out of his mouth making bubbling sounds. We picked him up by the armpits and carried him down. At the spot on my back where his right hand rested I received a radiation burn. He died at 6:00 a.m. in the Chernobyl hospital, never having regained consciousness. The two guys who looked for him with me later died in a Moscow hospital.”
“There was a loud thud that made the windows rattle,” fireman Leonid Shavrej remembered. “I jumped up immediately. The emergency signal kicked in almost at the same moment. We jumped out on the street, ran toward our trucks, and heard the dispatcher yell that there was a fire at the atomic station. We looked up and saw a mushroom cloud; it also looked like the chimney above the Unit 4 reactor was half gone. We were never instructed on how to work in radioactive conditions—despite the fact that the fire station was attached to a nuclear power station.”
By 4:00 a.m., 186 firemen in eighty-one engines were fighting a fire that couldn’t be extinguished. In such a crisis, eyewitness memories often conflict. “We didn’t know it was the reactor because no one told us. We thought it was just a normal fire,” one emergency worker insisted, but Anatoli Zakharov said, “I remember joking to the others, ‘There must be an incredible amount of radiation here. We’ll be lucky if we’re all still alive in the morning.’ Of course we knew! If we’d followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation—our duty. We were like kamikaze.” One described his experience of the radiation as “tasting like metal,” and feeling pins and needles all over his face. For ninety minutes they tried to control the flames, and one by one almost every man collapsed, vomited, and passed out. The nuclear fire that produced enough effluvia cloud to cover a continent in toxic fallout would take two weeks to extinguish. Lyudmilla Ignatenko:
One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. Vasily saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”
At seven I was told he was in the hospital. I ran there, but the police had already encircled it, and they weren’t letting anyone through. Only ambulances. The policemen shouted: the ambulances are radioactive, stay away!
I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes. Many of the doctors and nurses in that hospital, and especially the orderlies, would get sick themselves and die. But we didn’t know that then.
The doctor came out and said, yes, they were flying to Moscow, but we needed to bring them their clothes. The clothes they’d worn at the station had been burned. The buses had stopped running already and we ran across the city. We came running back with their bags, but the plane was already gone. They tricked us. So that we wouldn’t be there yelling and crying.
There’s a fragment of some conversation, I’m remembering it. Someone is saying: “You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You’re not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself.” And I’m like someone who’s lost her mind: “But I love him! I lov
e him!”
After fourteen days, Vasily died and, being so radiant, was buried in a series of matryoshka exequies, his body wrapped like a nesting doll in a cellophane bag, then settled within a wooden coffin, then covered in another heavy bag, then set inside a zinc coffin, and finally entombed in a concrete slab.
Two hours after the Lenin Atomic Station blew up, Moscow received a coded signal—“1, 2, 3, 4”—meaning the absolute highest state of emergency. Gorbachev called the Politburo into crisis session, and by Saturday noon a fact-finding team of doctors, physicists, and government officials were flying to Kiev and being ZIL-limousined to Pripyat. The group report mentions “a white pillar several hundred meters high” of fire and smoke marked by “individual spots of deep crimson luminescence . . . of burning products constantly flying from the crater of the reactor” and local officials who had no idea what they were supposed to do in such a catastrophe, as “they had no guidelines written earlier and were incapable of making any decisions on the spot.”
By May 8, firemen’s pumps had drained 5 million gallons of radioactive water out of the reactor’s basement, but this exposed more graphite to air, which continuously ignited, and the nuclear fire continued. Finally it was understood that water alone could not extinguish this blaze, so the decision was made to try to smother it. At 11:00 p.m., the town organized 150 of its residents to go to a quarry by the river and fill bags with sand. But they forgot twine to close up the bags, so calico strips from holiday ornaments were used instead—a perfect counterpoint to the plant’s peppermint-candy-cane smokestacks. Soviet Mi-8 helicopter teams then hovered 110 meters (360 feet) above the fire, the crews leaning out their side hatches to dump those holiday bags of river sand—in ninety-three flights, they whelmed the atomic volcano with nearly one hundred thousand pounds. Until the end of June, helicopters blanketed the fire with 37 million more pounds of sand, clay, boron, and dolomite. Word passed among the pilots that if they ever wanted to have kids, they needed to shield their testicles with lead. “By May 4 the pilots had buried the reactor core in sand despite conditions that were difficult and dangerous,” chemical defense chief Colonel Anatoli Kushnin said. “The dosimetric devices on these helicopters measured radiation levels of up to five hundred roentgens an hour.” A lethal dose of radiation is about a hundred roentgens per hour for five hours; some Chernobyl sections measured twenty thousand roentgens per hour. “We started out wearing protective suits in Chernobyl, but it made us move very slowly, because they’re so heavy,” American oncologist Robert Gale wrote. “So people ended up getting more radiation because they were wearing these heavy clothes. It was better to work very fast, without protection, than very slowly with protection. In the end, we didn’t wear any protective clothing.”